Bringing together urban planners and solar heating and cooling experts was the objective of the workshop on the French island of Réunion at the end of September (see photo) as part of Task 51, Solar Energy in Urban Planning, of the IEA Solar Heating and Cooling (SHC) Programme. The French overseas department intends to do away with fossil energies in the electricity sector by 2020 and in the island's total energy mix by 2030. As the generation of PV electricity has grown drastically over recent years and the small island grid is getting into trouble managing solar electricity, some new housing areas on the island have made solar thermal mandatory and banned PV.

The SHC2015 conference in Istanbul from 2 to 4 December 2015 will highlight the most important results and outcomes of the IEA SHC programme's main tasks and aims at discussing them with representatives from the industry and public bodies. For the first time, an Industry Day gathers topics of high interest to the industry, such as the role of solar heating and cooling in Europe's future energy mix, new opportunities in the MENA and Gulf region, as well as Global Certification to remove market barriers.

Frantor, the Mexican manufacturer and assembler of solar thermal systems based on vacuum tubes, has decided to start producing its own vacuum tubes. The new factory is expected to start manufacturing 80,000 tubes per month in 2018. Frantor located in Jalisco state in western Mexico, will be the first vacuum tube manufacturer in Latin America and wants to provide vacuum tubes to other Mexican producers, as well as to companies across the Americas.

The IEA’s solar heating and cooling programme has begun its research activities on solar thermal systems of gigawatt size. Scientists, industry representatives and utilities have been invited to participate in a definition workshop for a new task in the Austrian city of Graz on 5 November 2015. Sabine Putz, COO and R&D Manager at S.O.L.I.D., an Austrian large-scale turnkey system supplier, has proposed a four-year research programme entitled Large Scale Solar District Heating and Cooling Systems, which aims at studying economic, engineering and quality factors influencing solar district heating and cooling systems above 3.5 MW and up to GW size.

There is great scepticism among Europe’s solar thermal collector manufacturers about whether or not the energy labelling will increase demand for solar thermal systems. In a survey carried out by German agency solrico, more than 50 % of the European solar thermal manufacturers disagreed with the statement “The energy labelling will foster your solar sales”. All in all, 158 solar collector and solar tank manufacturers in Europe took part in the survey.

The one-day workshop of the French solar sector to discuss the General State of Solar Heat in 2015 (États Généraux de la Chaleur Solaire 2015) took place in Nantes on 20 October with around 130 participants. The market is still decreasing, but the industry is closing its ranks to get out of the difficult situation. Multi-family housing and large-scale solar fields could give solar a second chance – that's at least what the French solar sector has been betting on.

The new collector label Solergy has just been created and has already sparked a lot of debate in Germany. On the one hand, there is a growing number of collector manufacturers, associations and also the certification body DIN Certco – which are supporting the implementation of the label. On the other hand, there are the European bodies relevant to the solar thermal sector, such as the European Solar Thermal Industry Federation (ESTIF) and the Solar Keymark Network, which are not in favour of Solergy, although they do fancy the idea behind such a collector label. To understand the reasons for the controversy, one has to look at the evolution of the label.